What i’ve really noticed using Generative AI in research is the speed of my curiosity. Not simply speed of retrieval, but speed of synthesis and iteration. It reminds me of the process of marking up a large illustration, where you sketch out the rough outline before filling in the fine detail. Or the way i often create a high level structure for a book before actually writing much content, to allow me to balance the effort across all the sections.
Using tools like Claude i can more easily try things out: synthesising ideas, asking for depth, or inspiration. I can mark out a landscape and then delve more deeply into it.
I find that it’s easier to retrieve half remembered theories or facts, or to dive into entirely uncharted waters. In a weird way it’s like asking the server what their favourite desert is when you can’t decide.
It’s not efficiency without cost: i notice that i’m overall reading less. Partly because i do not need to, but partly because i have become impatient. Perhaps i will lose some of the happenstance and emergence of long form exploration, but overall the landscape i traverse will be broader?
It’s hard to know: will my perspectives become superficial, or will my self critical lenses survive the convenience of my accelerated curiosity?
I am, as you know, an optimist, so naturally i feel the benefits acutely, especially when i think back to my earliest experiences of research as a postgraduate, where i still had to get my supervisor to sign a piece of paper (after i’d cycled to the campus and wandered around till i found them), which i’d take to the library who would, after six weeks usually, ring me up to tell me that a photocopy of an article i’d requested had arrived. From there to here is a journey that sees the radial compression of time – to near instantaneous, through to the radical expansion of the creative space, as i have a partner in thought at my fingertips.
I know it will make me different, but better? Hard to know: to an extent it depends on which measure you are using.
My favourite use case (which i must not therefore mistake for a broad truth) is that Generative AI lubricates our collective thinking: working with Sae this week on new ideas we have used it as a dynamic dialogic partner, in the flow of our thinking. It’s felt like an energy added to our (already energetic!) conversations.
I’m pragmatic, but also stubborn. I do not intend to write ‘with’ Generative AI, any more than i intend to stop illustrating by hand. But will i use these tools to mark out ideas, to broaden my thinking and challenge my output? Asking for feedback, critique, ideas, or where to look next? I’m sure i will.
It’s easy to get caught up in the popular debate: about bias, about validity, about influence or infiltration, about the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. All of those things are important. But let’s not miss the potential, the excitement, the dynamism and change.
I have no hesitation in saying that Generative AI will change almost everything, and faster than most Organisations will be able to think, let alone react. Things that we feel will last forever will be tumbled into the sand (including the memories of those very Organisations who felt their intelligence, history, money, and pride would make them agile, whilst failing to actually change).
At the heart of it, Generative AI will challenge legacy notions of value, and we will need to recalibrate marketplaces to accommodate that. I look at this within the broader context of the Social Age (which is already exerting existential pressure onto our systems) and the legacy of the pandemic, which has fractured some of the pillars that we rest upon.
I’m sharing work this week on ‘disorientation and being lost’ in learning – part of a broader pattern of work around the ‘Unreconciled Self’ and ‘Imperfect Leadership’ – so as a word of warning, expect this writing to be convoluted… or possibly adrift! I’m playing with new ideas.
To say that leadership is systemic is tautologic. At least until we question our understanding of where the boundaries of the system lie. In my work on the Social Age, i would argue that the context of our Organisations has shifted, and much of that shift has permeated the boundaries of our Organisations, to the extent that we may now need to consider leadership as a more holistic feature, held both within the formal structure and, at the very least, at the boundary of the system (if not trespassing beyond it).
As with various aspects of the modern Organisation, this represents a shift in the Social Context and Contract, and one which we focus on more from the perspective of what we can take, than what it will cost us.
We already see the increasing anthropomorphism of Organisations through the facility of the ‘Social CEO’, the one with the stream of narrative on social channels about their strategy, direction, humility, and pride (with varying perceptions of authenticity from their audience), and in parallel this reflects the general experience for many of us – against a backdrop of a fractured Social Contract – that we operate as an irreducible unit of one – and that we should curate and maintain the strength and reputation of that ‘self’.
When we hire someone, we hire their time, and their portable persona, as well as renting access to their network – which essentially means hiring access to their collective ‘sense making’ space. Or at least we do if they trust us with it.
Whilst utility can be bought, access, trust, and community are gifted and privileged.
All of this – as well as broader trends around our radical connectivity, the new nature of knowledge, and the full context of the Social Age – lead to a strange phenomenon whereby the strength of our Organisations may be more distributed (and negotiated or gifted), where we need leadership to be more interconnected and inter-connective, at the very time that our sense of belonging, purpose, and opportunity may be fleeing to external structures (like communities of practice or purpose, where we earn no money but find great value).
Or to put it another way: we know what Organisations were, but not necessarily what they are today, or what they need to be tomorrow. And whilst we view our Organisations as formal and owned constructs they are, in fact, social constructs and devolved. Organisations are what we dreamed them up to be – and must become something new.
Around all of this, the weather. We are rebuilding in a storm. Potentially a tipping point or fracture: moving from the Structural Organisation to the Socially Dynamic at the time when the storm of Generative AI, social context, and the Social Age all break over us.
Tomorrow i’m sharing new work on ‘Disorientation and Imperfection’ here in Sweden. It’s very early stage writing and thinking, considering how we may wish to build systems that can hold greater ambiguity, and a capability to ‘get lost’, to move things ‘out of focus’, and to embrace imperfection.
I have to say it’s been a really challenging day, trying to find a narrative through this. So challenging that, at times, i’ve considered retreating to safety.
There will be around a hundred people in the session tomorrow, and of course i do not wish to fail, so my sense is that i will need to share the vulnerability of this work itself, whilst also trimming back what i intend to cover. Too much will simply make it fall apart.
And i don’t have to find the whole story in one go: it’s ok to build out the components first of all.
Key questions i will ask include ‘what does it mean to be lost’, which is about how our safety can be tied to our certainty, and how we tend to view learning as the discovery of an ‘answer’ or fixed capability, when in fact what we may need is the ability to get truly lost.
We will consider the nature of our strength: when held in systems, or in uncertainty and curiosity. I think i will talk about how nets are made: the idea that they can distort, and that different hands can tie the knots. About how they can be distorted and yet remain strong. Strength through distribution, and a kind of decentralised model of power.
We will think about the nature and role of perfection in our practice, and how imperfection may be a different type of strength, something that i’ve been particularly interested in around leadership, and the work on ‘Imperfect Leadership’. And finally i want to bring in some of the ideas around boundaries – around the things that cross over and the role of trespass as an act of leadership and learning.
I think i am almost there with a coherent story – or coherent enough to share – but i have to say it’s been a challenging process! A reminded that our certainty is comfortable, and that – no matter how much we identify as being independent of thought – to move from certainty carries risk.
Whilst we experience the landscape around us as a fixed feature, that is only because our perspective is so brief. In truth, the landscape is a fluid system, a product of deposition and erosion, at the mercy of geological forces, meteorological events, and of course human influence (both intentional and as a by product of our actions).
Geological processes give us mountains, and the weather erodes those mountains into sand. And humans? They dig up the sand to make buildings, changing the environment to suit their needs.
In this sense, whilst seismic activity and coastal dynamics are blind, human intervention is typically intentional and directional (although the acid raid and climate change caused as a by product of our actions, less so).
We change the world in specific ways. Humans build, whilst entropy waits.
What started as an evolutionary imperative to survive has itself evolved into a very human urge to shape. In the developed parts of the world we have long ago evolved from doing only the essential – that which is necessary for our survival – to investing predominantly in our comfort and desires. Our connection to our immediate sustenance, to the making of bricks and planting of seeds, tends to be peripheral at best. But we are heavily invested in Netflix and yoga.
And part of what we have created are our social structures: we have, in a very real sense, invented our society and the civilisations that we inhabit. Bit by bit. Ritual by ritual. Belief by belief. And artefact by artefact. We have built our world and come to see it as real.
In part, it is our creative brains that have allowed us to do this: we have our imagination, to conceive alternative futures, and our language, to share those futures with others. If we are lucky (or powerful enough) we can build consensus (or impose labour) and effect change. We can collectivise and organise at scale (and of course by the same mechanisms we can collectivise and rebel at scale too!).
So we live in the world we inherit today, and dream of the world we desire tomorrow.
As our societies have become more advanced, so too they have become radically complex: our structures of society, of education, information, transport, telecommunications, agriculture and health are all immense and interlinked. To retain mastery in the face of this complexity we have invented mechanisms of understanding, structural power, and control.
We invented bureaucracy, we invented finance, we invented HR and paperclips. We invented Mission Control, Gantt Charts and Generative AI.
We invented busyness and cultures that reward it.
And somewhere in this mix, we invented leaders.
Leadership today is different things to different people: a need, a challenge, a vocation or a chore. Some seek it out, and others have it proverbially thrust upon them.
And leadership today inhabits a very dynamic context: we no longer seek to be simply monolithic, but rather agile. An innovative, whilst also transforming into some unspecified better version of our former selves.
Our modern Organisations seek to find, to discover, or to grow, the very best leaders that they can. But how is a leader made?
Not by geological processes, and nor by standing in a thunderstorm. It’s a feature that we can see, and sometimes admire, in people, but it’s also a delusion, a dogma, and a self belief.
Often we conflate ‘leadership’ with ‘like-r-ship’. We describe not evidence and fact, but rather belief and intuition. We know that some people are exceptional leaders, and have a well intentioned desire to help others to become so. And in service of this we spend vast amounts of money – eye watering amounts of money – on teaching, training, developing, and transforming both systems and the people who lead them.
So much money in fact, and so much time and belief, that you may wonder why we have not uncovered an underlying truth or golden nugget in the centre. A magical formula or set of rules.
We still ask questions like ‘are leaders born or made’? Can anyone lead? Or question whether we act from the front or the rear.
But all of this may be to miss the point that leadership is not a thing. Or rather, it is not one thing.
Or to put it another way – a very unhelpful and frustrating way – leadership is, of course, contextual.
At times we need someone to lead in a way that has been shown to them time and again – a way that has been hammered into their brain through repetition, simulation, rehearsal, and monitored performance over time. We need them to hit the nail again. And again. And again. And whatever they do, not to deviate from, the formulae. Lest the nail go un-hit.
And at other times, that failure to deviate, to question, to wonder, to be curious, to ask ‘why…’ leads us to fail. To stand there hammering the nail whilst the rest of the building collapses around our ears. Oblivious, as we have been deafened by the noise of the hammer.
Indeed it was a revelation to me that Organisations that fail are often full of brilliant leaders, as well as bright and engaged people like you and me. They just act in the wrong context. Persisting in behaviours that no longer suit the times. Somehow they are constrained – even if only by their own beliefs. Of course there are many reasons that people – and systems – fail, but it’s not simply a case of deficit. It’s not just that people do not know something: sometimes they know it, but are unable to use it.
This tips me towards a perspective whereby leadership is not simply additive: giving people new knowledge, skills, behaviours, purpose, or belief. Instead, it may be about changing focus, perspective, context, about fracturing certainty, creating space, and exploring ideas. Leadership may be a far more fluid feature of our systems than we imagine, and certainly one that moves beyond a hierarchy and job title alone.
In my work on Social Leadership i describe our Organisations as having two systems: a formal one (which you can see, own, and control) and a social one (which is the people that surround us, in all our erratic glory). Social Leadership posits that we lead at the intersection of these systems: between formal and social.
But how do we learn to do this?
How do we develop leaders if there is no defined, or universally accepted, measure of success?
How do we develop leaders if leadership may not even be a real thing?
I was prompted into this reflection by a conversation last week, where someone asked me that very question. How do you make people think differently, how do you make them into a better leader?
To which i replied that you don’t.
It would be a form of arrogance to believe that you can ‘make’ people be anything. Instead, we should consider it from a learning perspective: how do we learn to see the world – and hence how could we learn to see it differently.
But also from the perspective of belief: who do you believe that you are? What is your ‘self’, and how does that ‘self’ change?
Seeing the world differently? What possible use could that be?
Surely we want people to view the world with absolute clarity, in granular detail, and with an engineers mindset?
Well, maybe. But (of course), it’s contextual.
To tackle a known problem in a known space, that may be correct.
But if we are seeking to reinvent, reimagine, or re-contextualise our Organisations, we may need people who can look at the world in different ways, because they carry with them different lenses. People who can hold ambiguity, who can maintain dynamic tensions between varied ‘truths’. And who can withstand the comforting allure of certainty. Time and again.
For me this speaks for a dynamic quality: i’ve written about this from an Organisational perspective in ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’, considering how we build more fluid and reconfigurable structures, but it’s equally valid to consider it from a leadership one.
How do we build Socially Dynamic Leaders? Crucially to develop leaders who do not hold answers, but rather can create new meaning – who can look at the familiar and see it in different ways. People who can turn their certainty out of focus, and create (or borrow from each other) these different lenses, then to make sense of what they see. Individually, and by convening ‘sense making’ communities.
This is a model of humble leadership where there is no hero, but rather a collective capability. A model for leaders in service of community, but also connected to structure. At the intersection.
Escaping capture by the familiar, and powerful, and yet powerless. Not necessarily holding the power of direct action, but rather woven into a social context that permeates the organisation in breadth. Connected – within existing structures – and interconnected, beyond them.
But back to the key question: how would we develop this?
’Disturbance’, ‘Meaning’, and ‘Motion’ would be three words that come to mind.
Firstly, to create space, provocation, and context whereby delegates may discover their own disturbance. Disturbance is a foundation of learning – whether by curiosity or need – but that which we discover has a special potency. So helping leaders who are (by certain conventions and self belief) clever, powerful, confident, and used to performance, to move into uncertainty is a powerful thing. More powerful than simply telling them or trying to dazzle them.
I wrote recently about ‘Reflective Surfaces’ as one technique we can use here. Getting people to tell stories allows us to externalise the conversation, and when it is externalised, we can consider it differently. This is a therapeutic approach, but equally valid for learning. And of course Generative AI tools make it easy to do this in different modalities and at a collective level. Taking small groups and reflecting their stories back to them, then working together in response, and dialogue, with those stories.
Dialogic approaches work well. Not teaching, but exploring. Establish community, build trust, then look down.
Formal systems react to disturbance in predictable ways: analysing it, mitigating the risk, repapering over cracks, isolating or ring-fencing it, occasionally persecuting it, or celebrating it. Social Leadership may be an act of collecting it up: understanding that a wave is both the thing that you see, breaking on the foreshore, but also the energy that travels within it. Disturbance, both that which we enjoy and fear, is the energy of the Organisation.
In my more recent work on Learning Science, i’ve been exploring the idea that the ‘creation of meaning’ is the pivotal aspect of learning. Not the acquisition of knowledge (and of course not simply the passing of tests). ‘Meaning’ is our understanding of the world: held not as an abstract notion, but rather as the stage that we act upon (and think within).
To understand how meaning is created, how it fractures and flows, competes and fails, evolves, is to understand the stage upon which our thinking, and acting, takes place. Essentially the ‘meaning’ is our view of the world, and hence the primary limiting force upon both our thought and action.
And it is, naturally, individual. My ‘meaning’ resides within my head, and yours within your own. We may share language – a way of articulating concepts and understanding – but our meaning is essentially individual. Indeed, one may possibly argue that our ‘meaning’ is in fact our ‘self’, in that our identity is related to our performance and experience.
In this sense, we can consider that developing leadership is in fact an evolution of ‘self’, but not in terms of new knowledge, rather in terms of new schemata and beliefs. Which sounds dangerously voodoo. I can see what it’s more attractive to talk in terms of skills and capabilities, as opposed to describing a reformulation, a re-authoring, of the ‘self’. But again, perhaps it can be both, dependent upon the use case.
The central idea is that we act within our sense of meaning – we act upon the world as we understand the world to be – and as we hope it may become.
Leadership development is hence a matter of reconceptualisation of the self, combined with developing a deep understanding of the mechanisms of effect. Of how the world around us at the social, collective cultural, and individual cognitive level, works.
Or to put it another way – indeed a way that kind of carries us back to engineering approaches, but in a very different context – leadership development is about understanding how humans work. With a recognition that this is at the individual and group social level. In parallel with an understanding of how systems work, again through a broad range of lenses – how systems make us safe, secure, static, and constrained.
These are our two dimensions of operation: people and systems. Selves and systems.
To understand how our systems of understanding (hence of meaning, and self) are disturbed. And to understand how ‘meaning’ is created and evolves, and the mechanisms by which our systems change – or remain constrained.
Understanding the ‘self’ and the ‘system’ is the context: Motion is the act of change.
Motion, in this sense, is a broad idea, but is the purpose of leadership. To be in motion.
At a personal perspective, this is the motion of dialogue with your practice. At the cognitive level it is to be in motion as the act of learning. At the cultural level it is to understand culture as a social context and movement. In the domain of innovation it is to understand ideas as fixed points and how we kick off from these. And at the organisational level it is to understand change as both formal (structural) and social phenomena.
As i said earlier: Organisations spend a great deal of money on leadership development, and indeed we often see common patterns in what they do. Asking people to look within (discovery of ‘self’ – often in a lovely hotel, with some good meals and perhaps an inspirational speaker). Articulation of challenge (articulation of the known and imagined spaces). And planning for action.
Where the opportunity lies is in a deeper engagement with the underlying forces behind this: to truly engage with disturbance (and related notions of ambiguity, complexity, and discomfort), to build a better understanding of the organisation as a system of belief and invested engagement (creation of meaning), and to recognise, and to be in, motion. Individually and systemically.
If we shift our focus, away from the granular, right up to the ecosystem level, we could see the following – but be aware that here i am including my own speculation, and nested concepts such as a belief that the ‘Social Age’ is a useful abstraction.
Leaders are a thing – or rather are many things – but crucially operating in multiple domains, and by different mechanisms in each.
Change is both structural and social – relating to both knowledge and conception. Change can be viewed as both logistical and epistemological – what we see and what we believe – our ways of being and knowing.
So to change our leadership is to discover disturbance, to create new meaning, and to be in motion.
Steering an Organisation is a tricky thing: partly because the boundaries of the system are more elusive than we may imagine, and partly because there is no steering wheel or joystick in sight.
Add to this that it’s not always clear who the Captain is (despite various people wandering around with badges and hats on, saying that they are in charge). And it may not be clear where the engine is. Or, indeed, how it works.
Organisations exist in two dimensions: the ‘Structural’ and the ‘Social’.
The Structural aspects are those most clearly visible: the physical assets, codified knowledge, formal systems, monitored processes, quantified metrics, brand identity, people, and publications. Everything that you can see, own, or control.
The Social aspect is equally ‘real’, although not in a physical sense: it’s the beliefs, dogma, hope, purpose, trust, connection, fear, dislike, community, authenticity, belief and belonging. Plus a bunch of other murky stuff that feels important, but is hard to pin down. Like the notion of ‘home’, which is both very concrete, but can also move with us when we travel.
We inhabit both: one through our formal contract, the other through our sense of community and belonging. And we are effective in both – or more accurately through both.
There is a great deal of doctrine and dogma about how we manage the formal, Structural, Organisation: the principles of scientific management, and the various schools of effectiveness and domain. Indeed, not only is there a whole industry of industry, there is a whole educational support structure, a regulatory web surrounding it, and various rockstars and wannabes hanging around it.
But clearly it’s not as simple as learning the rules and pressing ‘go’. Just about every Organisation has a formal leader, but very few of those Organisations are standing still. And their ability to change is variable at best (and there is, of course, a multi billion dollar change industry supporting those efforts).
So a reasonable question may be, ‘what is the point of a leader’?
If my car breaks down, i can hire a mechanic with a degree of confidence that they can fix it. But if culture breaks down, it’s a more tenuous belief as to whether a particular leader can fix it. Or if i need innovation, or change, or solidity, or fluidity, or efficiency, or mobility… indeed whatever i need it’s not usually as simple as advertising for a perfect candidate and achieving a perfect result.
Because to a large extent, leaders can do almost nothing at all. At least, not directly. Because a significant amount of what we need, to be truly dynamic, lies beyond the formal domains. The power given to us within a formal system does not translate into a social one.
Indeed: one reasonable view of leadership is that leaders hold all the formal power, but that effectiveness lies in places where they cannot spend it. At least not unless they earn a different type of power.
In the context of the Social Age, the ‘Social’ has been elevated (it’s where engagement, belonging, belief and purpose may lie), but the ‘Structural’ is still important. Both systems are aligned, but act differently, and deliver different outcomes.
Formal systems excel at doing what needs to be done. But much of our challenge today lies in figuring out what needs to be done differently.
Through history the byword of ‘power’ was ‘stability’, and ‘might’. Infrastructure, knowledge, force, control.
Today the bywords of power may be ‘community’, or possibly ‘belief’, or ‘curiosity’, or ‘authenticity’, or maybe ‘belonging’, or ‘trust’. All these things convey or carry power, yet sit beyond a formal system.
The reality is that we need both: we need strong Structural systems, but also dynamic Social ones. And strong leadership within, and between them.
This carries me to the language of intersections: leadership at the intersection.
The reason why the system of the Organisation may be elusive is that it is so much more than the formal assets we can see and directly control.
And the reason why it’s hard to find the steering wheel or joystick is because people are not moved by these things, so much as by their own engagement and agency.
To move a car you turn the wheel. To move an Organisation you create the conditions in which it chooses to turn.
Which sounds crazy. What is the point of power if you cannot use it? Or if it does not do what you want?
Well – it does, and you can – it’s just that the Organisation itself is so much more than that narrow definition of the things that fall directly under your control. So truth be told, you can steer something, but it may be a hollow victory if the movement is not willing and invested.
I’ve spent today considering aspects of leadership, specifically for those people responsible for strategy and direction. What – if anything – is leadership. And how – if at all – can we develop our capability, practice, or voice?
We talk about ‘leadership’ as if it were a thing, when it may be little more than a taxonomy of action, or a judgement upon such action.
We talk of ‘developing’ leadership, implying that there is deficit (which of course we qualify against our desired traits) and also a sense of ‘better or worse’ – in terms of capability.
In both cases we are liable to conflate things which are true, for things that we desire, or simply like.
There are tensions within any notion of leadership – that it be both ‘good’ and ‘fair’, and ‘effective’ and ‘structural’. We cannot be everything, as we are accountable in so many different dimensions. In this sense, and as i have explored recently, leadership may be viewed (if it is a thing at all) as an inherently imperfect feature (of inherently imperfect systems).
We must consider our nature to reduce: to analyse and deconstruct in the belief that there is a simply underlying structural component, and that if we ‘reduce’ things far enough, we will both find it, and be able to reproduce it. Reductionist approaches can be useful abstractions to categorise things, but may include significant assumption or elasticity. And we must remember that some things (like truth and trust) exist in multiple parallel contexts. So right now i both trust you, and don’t. And i hold both things to be entirely true, but in different parts of my self.
Social Leadership describes an understanding of leadership beyond systems. A notion that we lead at intersections, through both our formal authority but also social authority. In this sense it is a negotiated, not structural, model of power – and indeed it views leadership as inherently a conversation about power, with the caveat that it may be executed by using almost no power at all, except that invested in us by others.
Leadership at the intersection of systems is a model of leadership as motion, trespass, of understanding boundaries, and of operating to interconnect, often through difference.
Part of learning is the creation of ‘meaning’, building out our understanding of the world around us, and evolving that understanding through addition, fracture, and sharing. Sometimes we learn something new that invalidates the old, and sometimes it simply layers on top of it. We can view this process in various ways: as one of disturbance, of exploration, of change. But it’s not simply a solo cognitive activity.
Learning can be social, collaborative, co-created, and highly dynamic: not simply what ‘i’ think, but influenced by what ‘we’ think too. Indeed there is a certain elasticity around our learning, in that we can hold incomplete concepts and ideas, or contextual ones where our understanding or usage shifts dependent on what we are doing (consider how our relationship with ‘fairness’ is contextual).
Dialogue is part of this: not simply the dialogue we have with ourselves, our internal dialogue (something i explore in the Social Leadership Daily work), but also the dialogue with each other and, in the age of the Story Engines, dialogue with our devices too.
We considered the commoditisation of dialogue, and how Generative AI makes dialogic enquiry both widespread, and a solo activity: how you can prototype ideas, and rapidly iterate thought, in ‘conversation’ with the story engines.
The context of the Social Age sees a shift in the nature of knowledge itself, and our relationship with it. Perhaps a more pragmatic, albeit more fragile one. Democratised in terms of access, but more fractured in terms of validation and ownership. The creation of knowledge within communities – the increased globalisation of the local, tacit, and tribal – the desire of Organisations to access the social knowledge, and risks thereof.
In this context, i have increasingly differentiated between ‘knowledge’ and ‘meaning’, and indeed am inclined at times to describe learning – in Organisational contexts – as primarily the creation of meaning. So less about facts and figures, which are now mobile and come to us, through our distributed knowledge infrastructure, but rather more about the understanding, insight, and opportunity that we discover through ‘sense making’ processes.
We can support this at a procedural and methodological level through the creation of artefacts of thought, at both individual and collective level. I’ve been doing this recently with my co-author, Sae Schatz, on a leadership programme, whereby we are using the Generative AI tools not simply for analysis (sentiment, shared narrative, tone), but also for reflection. Creating images that represent and reflect back the story. And then using these for a further loop of learning.
This notion – that we run through successive loops, and can create artefacts of each one – helps us to explore and discover alternative ways of knowing. Partly because it removes our notion of one ‘perfect’ answer, in favour of a moveable boundary of knowing. The idea that our understanding may be a movable feature within a broader landscape.
I quite like this more dynamic view, which partly represents the nature of Social Collaboration, and how we each act upon the other, but also as it reflects the overall more dynamic view of Knowledge and hence ‘meaning’ in the Social Age. All of which indicates that we cannot thrive by teaching people ‘one way of knowing’, but rather need to build the capability of ‘sense making’ and understanding the mechanisms by which we create individual and shared ‘meaning’.
Our intention is to research and write more about these ‘Reflective Surfaces’, including some worked case studies: currently Sae, Geoff and i are talking about potentially creating a practitioners guide, or other resources to go alongside the book. The integration of Generative AI tools into our everyday practice will impact not simply systems and process (of efficiency and effect), but also our social practices of learning, and we hope to explore this further.
#WorkingOutLoud on Social Learning and Generative AI
I was talking yesterday with my friend Rhian about statues. Or, rather, she was talking and i was listening, with a group.
The statue in question was the one of Edward Colston, a slave trader from Bristol. He was such a luminary of the city that not only was there a society named after him, but also a selection of roads, a concert hall and school. If you go to Bristol today you can see him down by the harbour, staring out over the river.
Or rather, you can’t, because Rhian bought the rope used to pull him down, and others in the crowd dragged the statue to the river and rolled it right in.
The story she shared became global, and her own trial and subsequent acquittal for criminal damage drew attention from everyone up to the Home Secretary.
Different people have different views: some say that we should remember the context in which slavery took place, and that views have changed, that we should not rewrite history (as if it’s written in stone) or that the vandalism of artefacts defaces our shared cultural heritage. Others would argue that slavery was an abomination, that it’s right to reassess our cultural heritage in contemporary perspectives, and indeed that it’s a moral imperative to do so. To pass judgement upon previous actions, even if our judgement is largely symbolic. Still others may point out that we hardly live in an equitable society, and that history casts it’s shadows into generational and geographic disenfranchisement of today.
Indeed, Rhian touched upon various aspects of this, but with a humility. She speaks often with more caution than certainty, and a recognition that other views differ. And most of all, with a passion and intensity that leaves her physically shaking.
Yesterday, whilst listening to her story, i was more absorbed watching her within the story, and seeing her as he storyteller.
The group were very wrapped up in it, and understandably so: it’s a privilege to hear stories of difference and dissent. We do not have to agree with everything we hear, but to hear opposing views and to create and hold a space where we can explore them is powerful indeed.
I know Rhian’s story inside out, having watched her live it the first time around, through the uncertainty and doubt, and finding both strength, and community, to follow the 18 month legal process in the spotlight of the worlds media.
Hearing the emotion in her voice, it reminded me of the power we find when engaged at the most elementary level of stories. Without any PowerPoint presentation, any notes, or any artefacts, we gathered around the images that she painted through her words.
I think different people took different things from the story, and each of us, of course, through our own lenses and worldview.
That’s as it should be: some stories we simply pick up, others we use as filters, weapons or tools. I hope that this story is one that people can use to consider, reflect upon, and discuss, their own power, and the cost of that power.
My favourite terrarium shop has closed down. It’s not that much of a surprise, because i’m not sure how many people really buy a large glass jar containing it’s own sealed ecosystem whilst on a day trip to London (especially not when they cost hundreds of pounds and don’t fit easily into a backpack), but nonetheless, the owners were always enthusiastic and welcoming to idle passers by like myself.
Closed systems are fascinating to us, perhaps because they appeal to our innate need to control context, or maybe because they allow us to demonstrate our nurturing self as we decide whether to crack the system open or not.
In case you are not in the know, terraria are generally bottles or flasks of some sort, within which we place everything needed for a healthy and thriving ecosystem – like soil, water, plants, decorative rocks, maybe even bacteria, nematodes, some moss – and then we seal it up. Sometimes for years, or even decades, at a time. It’s a godlike power made real for $199.
In theory, these systems, if well constructed, can persist: the plants breathe, the water recycles, the soil takes care of itself, so long as you got the ph balance and bacterial colony right.
Although often, it does not.
The system becomes ill, failing, degraded. Perhaps a fungal infection or the appearance of rot, or an algal bloom on the glass, or things mysteriously dying off or drying out.
But: not problem. As i said, we have the godlike power to take out the cork and do something about it. Add more water, or a friendly bacterial mix, or pluck out a diseased leaf, or add some more aesthetic moss or rocks.
We can tweak it before resealing it.
But what if it goes wrong again? This time the plants grow so fast that they fill the space, our view is obscured, the health of the system is degrading our view.
No problem: break the seal again and start pruning. Adding, subtracting, tinkering.
Sometimes though, the closed system just fails to thrive: not yet dead, but not fully dynamic either. Just hanging in there. Of course, people being people we have tried these systems at scale: in the late 1980s a billionaire with a fascination for ‘spaceship earth’ funded construction of Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 being the one we live on day to day) – the worlds largest closed ecosystem. Then, having build the thing, they sealed a group of scientists and explorers into it, to see what would happen.
The experiment was multi disciplinary: biological, to see how the ecosystem would thrive, but also inherently social, to see what the people would do. In theory – or so the idea went – if we could learn to create thriving closed systems, we could package one onto a spacecraft and blast it off to Mars, or beyond. A systems carrying everything it needed to persist, in theory for perpetuity – which, after all, is what the earth does (if you ignore the inconvenience of passing meteorites adding new material to the mix every now and then).
Sadly, neither the ecological system, the social dynamics of the eight explorers (sealed up for two years), nor the people who owned it, thrived – although Biosphere 2 itself has weathered time remarkably well, and persists under the ownership of the University for Arizona to this day.
The appeal for closed systems is not limited to eccentric billionaires and space faring aficionados. It’s also in part the approach we take to leadership and learning. The idea that our Organisational systems are sealed (in that the boundaries are airtight) and that we can tinker our way to health.
That we can control what goes in, what stays in, and somehow control what rots.
In part this relates to the appeal of mechanistic thinking: the notion that we can deconstruct the complex into the understandable, and hence reduce it to the learnable and repeatable. This works for cars. But less so for frogs. Sure, we can dissect the, but we cannot yet build them. Not least because features such as brains still demonstrate an ‘emergence’ of property – which may be another way of saying that they require magic, in the truest sense that they require things we do not yet understand.
We all to easily structure our approaches to learning on this basis: what should we tip in, what should we hold back. And for leadership a similar recipe: how do we build a leader? What is desired, and what needs to be plucked out.
Of course to compound the issue, at the very time when technology may allow us to truly personalise learning, or to fully democratise leadership, we find that that the glass walls of the organisation are not simply transparent, but also they are permeable. Things leak.
Ideas, people, networks, knowledge, dissent, belonging, belief. These things are hard to contain.
Today we are more likely to learn from our network than on our networks. We are more likely to belong in a community than to an employer brand, and perhaps we are more likely to invest our engagement in line with our purpose than our contract.
We can – more so than ever – be many different people in many different spaces. We move between the jars. And perhaps what we leave behind is the mud.
Perhaps one way to understand this is to recognise that we have moved away from the Organisation being a formal structure, towards it being both social and formally contextualised. And at times it does not want, know, recognise, nor believe in this truth. We persist in thinking that Organisations are things, when in fact they are largely common delusions, of law, system, process, belief, purpose. But not in the truest sense are they real.
Biosphere 2 was itself not one thing: there were seven biomes – seven different spaces – plus the living quarters and laboratories, and underneath it all, the ‘lungs’, the networks of tunnels and pump rooms, electrical infrastructure and plumbing – because for a tree to thrive there must be roots.
Perhaps one way to better conceptualise leadership is as a feature that links between biomes, or to understand the Organisation as a connected series of separate spaces (where the connection is not simply the ‘formal’ paths, but also includes the spores blown on the wind.
In the formal domain, our Organisations do indeed appear to be closed systems: with your formal power you cannot name one thing that you cannot see, influence, or move, in the sense of those things you own and control – like desks, rules, contracts, carpets, and machines. But in the social context, they are something else.
For both leadership, and learning, to understand the context of the Social Age is to understand the ways that our radical connectivity and shifting systems of power have abstracted the jars, have blurred or changed the nature of boundaries.
We can still influence and interact, but our interaction is more of nurturing than controlling.
So should we smash the terraria? Or tear down Biosphere 2 (in the early 2000’s this was nearly it’s fate – to be demolished in favour of new housing and a mall).
Maybe not.
Tending to closed systems helps us to think – and forces upon us a humility to learn. So long as we don’t mistake the simulacra for the thing itself.
The closed systems are representations of the thing, and even when we simulate every feed we can conceive, they are but shadows. Useful ones maybe. Learning to tend to a system is to learn the limits of our direct action, and the nature of patience (and hope!). And today Biosphere two hosts tens of thousands of students and science retreats a year, with multiple experiments running within it’s thriving biomes.
I’m reminded that whilst i loved that terrarium shop, i never bought anything. And indeed i suspect they did not sell that many bottles on any given week. But they hosted perpetual classes and workshops, and sold a lot of the medicines and devices to care for the system. Perhaps they made more money from the sickly jars than the thriving notion of perfection.
If someone asks me what my favourite album is, i’ll probably choose something carefully. I won’t want to go for anything too mainstream, lest i appear unimaginative, but equally i don’t want to choose something so utterly obscure that i have to provide three minutes of context about how i discovered them whilst on a surf trip to Portugal, playing the back room of the third most popular bar. I want it to be different enough to make me interesting, but not so different that i sound like i’m trying too hard. And it can’t be the same thing my brother chooses, because that would never fly. And it shouldn’t be offensive, because you may judge me. And the odds are, that when i ask the question back, we will have made different choices from each other. Music tastes diverge widely.
By contrast, if i ask you if you are honest, you will probably say ‘yes’, or maybe ‘as honest as anyone can be’. And so will i. We will tend to converge to a social norm.
If we work together, and take a course together, and someone asks us if we adhere to the company values… well, i don’t know about you, but i’d probably say yes. Unless i was feeling contrary. I mean, it doesn’t cost me anything, and what’s the point in standing out from the crowd?
Unless the facilitator was extremely annoying, and i knew that my friends would laugh. Then maybe i would. After all, anything that bonds us more closely together in adversity is a good thing.
Formal learning tends to work towards convergence, certainly for things like compliance training, or culture work. We even say we don’t just want people to think differently, we want them to ‘do’ differently too – but by that we mean that we want them to do the thing we want them to do.
Social Learning approaches, by contrast, can be more like asking people for their favourite album, in that they will choose something that is music, but it may not be to your taste. Inherently a Social Learning approach is more tolerant of divergent narratives, precisely because the outcomes are held in narratives – personal and co-created community narratives – and the forces that act upon us as we write these stories are both formal and sociocultural.
Understanding this can provide a useful perspective on how, and when, to use Social Learning approaches within a holistic learning approach for an Organisations. Using methods that foster both divergence, and convergence, can be helpful, in that it allows us to be usefully aligned, and creatively different through curiosity. Almost like a frame and a picture: the frame we may wish to be shared – a convergent view, but the pictures can all be different, because nobody wants the house filled with identikit images.
This may speak to leadership too: leaders who foster divergence, and can listen as opposed to respond. Leadership is a divergent feature.
I have found that this language, of convergence and divergence, has made it’s way into the vocabulary of my practice, across multiple areas, but i hope not in a naive way. It’s easy to say that ‘we value different thinking’, or ‘diverse teams are stronger teams’, but this is not necessarily true. There is a need to understand how that divergence is held. Otherwise it’s simply an aberration that we persecute. What is often meant is ‘you can be different within this one narrow context, but please ensure you conform to a common view in all others, at all other times’. We want creative difference, when it suits us.
I suspect that we could shift to a wide focus on this and consider that, at the widest level, divergence may be held, in a Socially Dynamic Organisation, in a diverse tribal structure, loosely interconnected back into the formal ones. So we have both structure and uncertainty, convergence and difference, held in a dynamic tension.
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Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 